Galway City Council’s meeting was suspended this week after a councillor compared the mayor to Mussolini.
The City of the Tribe’s Mayor, Colette Connolly, stopped proceedings after another councillor, Fianna Fáil’s Alan Cheevers, said she was controlling the meeting, “like Mussolini.”
Ms Connolly took umbrage and promptly suspended Monday evening’s council meeting for five minutes.
Ms Connolly is an independent councillor who was elected Mayor last June, but she is also the sister of the respected Leas Ceann Comhairle of the Dáil, Catherine Connolly.
The Mussolini dig that silenced the meeting was slammed as “inappropriate and disrespectful” by the Mayor when she was contacted by the Irish Mirror.
Mayor Connolly said the accusation was “out of order.”
During the Galway City Council meeting on Monday, tensions ran high after Councillor Cheevers said that Mayor Connolly was running the meeting like a dictatorship - comments which saw the meeting adjourned for five minutes.
Mayor Connolly told the Mirror that she saw reason to suspend the meeting after Mr Cheevers' comments.
Mr Cheevers said: “You're running the meeting like Mussolini.”
Ms Connolly said: "The reason we adjourned is that I deemed Councillor Cheevers out of order.
"We were on the minutes, he was raising and making statements - you are only on the minutes to raise matters of clarification.
"We have a long, long agenda, we had numerous reports, and a council meeting is governed by an agenda and we were over the minutes of raising clarifications."
Ms Connolly added: "He accused me of running a dictatorship, which is absolutely inappropriate and disrespectful.
"There's a number of standing orders governing the conduct of councillors in the chamber, which were read out, and to be quite frank it is extremely difficult in those circumstances to run the meeting efficiently.”
The Mayor also said she was “not happy” with the meeting, only having got through two items during it.
She added: "The fundamental disrespect shown by Councillor Cheevers is hardly acceptable.
“He has to respect that my job primarily is to get through an agenda on a meeting.
"We are all frustrated by the way the city hall is run, by the lack of staff - but equally we have to get through the business of the day.
“That's the way I view it."
Mr Cheevers told the Mirror: “I wrote to the mayor, I told her she was running the meeting like a dictator and I wouldn’t be attending any meetings until this was resolved, because I don’t see it being fair and it’s not being impartial.”
A spokeswoman for the Leas Ceann Comhairle said she did not have a comment to make on the story.
